Is your kitchen garden filled with bounty but lacking a little pizzazz? Take some sage advice from the gurus of growing herbs: Adding a few aromatic plants will spice up the garden and table. "If you remotely like food, using fresh herbs — more than any other ingredient — will take your cooking to a higher level," says Jeff Sorenson, co-owner of Rabbit Shadow Greenho...

1. Never plant any kind of mint directly in the ground. Plant it in a barrel container instead. It spreads via runners beneath the soil and depending on how aggressive the variety of mint you plant is, it will most likely escape your garden and become a problem. Of course, if you actually WANT a minty ground cover, go for it, but when it takes over the neighbors' yards with a kudzu-like virulence, don't expect any words of congratulations from your HOA board. Of course, having the resources at the ready to bribe the HOA board with mojitos might not be a bad thing either.

2. You'll have to pinch back the blossoms of plants like thyme, rosemary, basil and so on if you don't want the plant to go to seed. If the plant is trying to produce flowers and seeds, the taste of the leaves will suffer as the plant's energy is directed elsewhere. If you have a lot of herb plants, plan on doing this every other day during the summer, as herbs won't give up the fight to create seeds easily. On the other hand, if you find that you like providing bee habitat, let them flower and enjoy the honeybee and bumblebees that will stake out your garden. Plant in a few of the more compact herbs amongst the veggies (if you have a vegetable garden), luring the insects over to pollinate the tomatoes and squash blossoms.

3. Unless you have some favorable microclimates in your yard, your rosemary is going to die off with the first frost if you plant it out of doors. This isn't a cold-tolerant herb. I've never had luck with growing rosemary indoors during the winter either, so treat it like an annual and when the time comes, make a pork or pot-roast with it in autumn.